


one more drink and i'll be fine

by irnan



Category: Captain America, Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-21
Updated: 2012-10-21
Packaged: 2017-11-16 18:56:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/542747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irnan/pseuds/irnan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maria Carbonell is too Italian to be a New Yorker and too American to ever be able to come home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	one more drink and i'll be fine

**Author's Note:**

> Despite the title (from the Magic Numbers), it's not actually a story about Maria and Howard being alcoholics (though they do drink a lot in this fic, that was deliberate, but yeah.) I've been waiting for this to put itself together for a while; at first it seemed to want a plot (Howard and Maria collect Russian spies, it was the Sixties, don't ask), but I like it better this way - with the tight focus on Maria herself.

“Be sure,” says Howard. He’s leaning against his desk clutching the whiskey glass and looking at her like she’s the Angel Gabriel come to save him and it makes Maria want to laugh, the notion that she’s capable of saving anyone, but he’s looking at her. He’s looking at her. He sees her. “Be sure. I’m a war profiteer, I’m twenty years too old for you, I will fail you, Maria, over and over, because I can build the weapons my country needs to keep itself safe but I never seem able to do that for my family. People will talk – you’ll get called a whore and a gold-digger and I’ll get called a fool. Be sure.”

Maria steps out of her shoes, and puts her own glass down, and comes to him on silent stocking feet, and he still sees her, her, her, not her bare feet or her long legs or her smile or her breasts under the thin silk blouse: her. He would build her a house, he said yesterday, laughing over dinner, a house from which she would be able to look out of any window she wanted and always, always see the sea.

He’s taller than she is, even half-sitting on the desk: Maria moves between the vee of his legs and hitches up, the tiniest bit, on tiptoe. “I’m sure,” she says, and watches something break behind his eyes, and the sharp relief in his smile.

“Good,” he says roughly. His mouth is set, stubborn and selfish. “Good.”

Maria closes her eyes when he kisses her, and shivers at how hard his hands close over her upper arms, and digs her nails into his sides in retaliation, and finally gets to _stop_.

*********

Maria is eight when her parents die. Nonna raises her as best she can, with kindness and hard work and the money sent by Frank from New York. He finds an English nurse for her so Maria doesn’t forget Mamma’s English, says she should come to New York as well and let him take care of her. Uncle Guido and Aunt Sally would have wanted that.

“I don’t like it that he doesn’t talk about you coming with me,” she says to Nonna one night when Maria’s curled in bed and the breeze is rattling cheerfully at the shutters.

“You be grateful, girl,” says Nonna gently, stroking her hair. “Frank’s a good boy. Too many forget where they come from when they leave. You just be grateful.”

Nonna likes to stroke her hair when Maria’s in bed and Nonna’s told her a bedtime story. It’s nice, but what Maria really wants is the kind of bone-crushing hug that Papa and Mamma would dole out on a regular basis. Missing them is like missing a _limb_ , decides Maria. Or her _soul_.

But she’s young, and she was younger when they died. They’re streaks of gold in her memories soon, bright, shining love, all the details rubbed over by time.

*********

By the time her tenth birthday has been and gone, she’s on a steamer to New York with Frank and Nonna is buried in the same graveyard her younger son and daughter-in-law were laid to rest in.

“I don’t want to,” she’d said at the funeral, frozen with grief.

Frank had laughed. “You’ll like it,” he said, looking around at the little orchard, the olive trees, the grass and golden dust, the rocks in the distance that lined the sea-path, the long hazy line of blue-green water, the crash of the waves, just close enough to be heard. “You’ll forget this place in no time.”

That was when Maria knew differently. Just to _spite_ him. Looking back on it later, she barely remembers what happened next. Home was behind her, falling away behind the horizon, and New York was ahead, towering stone and steel, as clean and sharp and empty as the steamer they’re in.

*********

Frank’s a businessman, and he doesn’t have time for orphaned cousins. He tells her they’re family and that means they take care of each other, but Maria drifts through his house like a pale little ghost, hating the marble, the big windows, the views, the rain, the god-awful English with the ridiculous accents that she barely understands. Mamma had been English, as English as the day, Papa had said, an English rose.

There is nothing _rosy_ about New York.

She and Frank eat meals together; he talks about his day but never asks about hers; he buys her things but doesn’t seem to care if she likes them. And then someone says _boarding school_ to him, and Maria thinks, oh, not again.

That doesn’t _stop_ him uprooting her again.

Nothing Maria says is ever going to stop people destroying what’s left of her life. That’s a lesson she learns early.

*********

Her English improves. So does her right hook. Amazingly, the latter earns her more friends than the former.

But upstate New York is so far from the sea.

*********

The war passes over her head with barely a flicker. She has no stake in it whatsoever, and little interest; she’s safe and sheltered, lonely and neglected.

She has nightmares about bombs falling on the villa, the graveyard, about submarines surfacing before her beach and soldiers setting fire to the olive trees.

*********

When she leaves school at eighteen she starts running Frank’s house for him, playing the elegant society hostess, and not a one of his business partners and friends are unimpressed.

“Who’d’ve thought,” says Jeffries – he’s a defence contractor, Maria remembers – “that skinny kid Frank used to talk about like she was a rock around his neck…”

Around the corner, Maria stiffens.

Someone else laughs. “Jeff, if it was you, you’da let her starve in an Italian orphanage.”

Jeffries laughs as well, though far more coarsely. “Doubt it. Not if you’d told me she’d grow up like –“

“Don’t make me _deck_ you, Jeff,” snaps a third voice.

“Geez, OK, OK, cool it, it was just a joke…”

Maria leaves. She doesn’t need to hear the rest of it.

*********

Two years later she finally persuades Frank to let her go to university back home. It’s a plane trip now, no more steamers, and stepping off it into the warm Italian sun is –

– well, it’s coming home, which was what she wanted. That’s a thought she beats herself over the head with when she realises she speaks Italian with an American accent now, is taken for a tourist, a rich businessman’s daughter here to amuse herself for a few years, when she can’t understand the dialects of the people she meets, when they scoff as she tells them she was born here – or worse, profess sympathy, how awful that you’ve lost so much of your heritage.

Maria Carbonell is too Italian to be a New Yorker, not the kind of New Yorker that Frank is, and too American to ever be able to come home.

*********

In the five years she stays in Italy, she never once tries to return to the little villa, the olive garden, the sea-path and the sand. She physically cannot. The notion makes her ill.

No evidence to the contrary means the house is still there, the trees are still there, the graves are untouched. Maria can go home, over and over, and it will always be perfect, shining warm and golden, waiting for her.

Until she actually goes, and finds it isn’t.

*********

Back in New York she tells Frank she’d like to be his secretary, just for something to do. He frowns.

“You don’t have to _earn your keep_.”

Derision in his voice. Maria can’t pretend she’s showing gratitude, she’s not grateful to him for a thing, though she knows she probably should be.

“I’m not trying to earn anything,” she says and sniffs. “Except possibly a better class of wine.”

He throws his head back and laughs. “OK, OK, I’m persuaded.”

In that moment Maria almost likes him.

*********

New York high society closes around Maria Carbonell like a glove tailored to her hand. It frightens her, how easily it fits. It scares her how much she enjoys it, thrives in it, spins it round her little finger and sends it running in all the directions she wants it to, because she knows, all the while, every second of every day, how much she wants to get to just go home.

(It takes her a long time to work out that she’s not betraying her dead parents, her dear Nonna, by learning to love New York. It takes her longer to accept it, if she ever does.)

She hosts parties and organises dinners and sorts out Frank’s schedule and does his typing, and goddamn it, sometimes she does like him. He’s not a fool and he’s not entirely unpleasant, just inconsiderate, just doesn’t know the first thing about raising children. He’s a snob, and arrogant, but there. So is she, a camouflage that’s become part of her skin. Maria tries to explain that to Daisy once, the closest of her girlfriends from school, the first one to laugh at how easily Maria could knock another girl down.

“It’s about adapting,” she says, wrapping and unwrapping her hands around the wine glass, and is yet unaware that come morning she will not remember how much she is about to tell Daisy, though Daisy always will, and will hold on to her the tighter for it. Maria might not remember the details of this particular conversation, but she will always, always be grateful for Daisy’s friendship. “It’s about not wanting to be noticed, and you _don’t_ wanna be noticed when your family’s all gone and you’re in a strange place and you don’t speak the language, and, oh! You’re only a child, a silly little girl. So you – camouflage. I don’t have a better word. You become what people expect and what they want, because that way they leave you alone. And – and not even that works, it’s all desperation, because Frank still sent me to school, but, you know, fuck.” She stops there, and puts a hand over her mouth, and thinks about it for a long time. “It’s about lying to people. And hiding from people. Other times it’s being exactly who you are, but exaggerated, overblown – the mad Italian girl, Sophia Loren writ small, I don’t know, they don’t know. The important thing is always that _they don’t see_.”

“I think,” says Daisy quietly, “that might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

*********

Maria holds on to how much more fun it is now than before she went back to Italy. She reads a lot and writes irritable essays about the books she didn’t like (mostly for lack of anything better to do), keeps them in her desk drawer until one day Daisy finds them and ships them off to her brother at the New York Times for a laugh.

She publishes them under the name Maria Collins. Frank never finds out.

*********

One day she makes the mistake of quoting herself verbatim at a dinner party when they’re all arguing about Daphne Du Maurier and one of the men looks up in surprise.

“That was in the Times, wasn’t it,” Howard Stark says. He’s a little younger than Frank, around forty, with a moustache and clever dark eyes.

“That’s right,” says Maria, feeling challenged. “I thought it was an uncommonly insightful comment.”

Stark’s eyes spark. “That’s what I thought too,” he says, grinning.

He’s an incorrigible flirt. That’s OK though, because so is Maria. Three hours later they’re still at it, smoking on the balcony and talking about the Russian space programme.

*********

The garden is always the perfect place to hide during a party. Maria knows this because she set it up that way. Bottle of whiskey in one hand, cigarette in the other, she kicks her shoes into the grass and perches on a bench, feeling uselessly upset. Frank thinks – all New York thinks – that she ought to get married, but God, if Jeffries leers at her one more time…

Someone’s coming into the garden from behind her, creeping – yes, creeping, trying awfully hard to be quiet as they cross the gravel. Maria looks up, frowning.

Is it Jeffries? She gathers her skirts and stands up, slowly, watching him move through the trees. What the hell is he doing out here? If he’s come for a quick fuck with any of her female guests she’ll scream loud enough to bring the house down. She knows for a fact that Jenny Camden’s trip to Europe last year included a termination, all expenses paid, on Jeff’s account.

Her dress rustles as she follows him, but that can’t be helped unless she takes it off. Thank God she’s wearing dark blue.

He’s meeting with someone all right. Past the topiary, near the back wall that encircles Frank’s garden, near the fountain so their words won’t be heard as easily; it’s a man in a hat, brim pulled low.

“… got the… on you?”

“Here. Has Stark…”

“He hasn’t agreed yet…” Jeffries is passing the stranger something, a packet – of papers? It’s small and rectangular and seems wrapped in some heavy cloth, maybe oilskin or something.

Maria wants to curse, creeps forwards, puts one bare foot on a horrifically sharp twig and would have shouted with the sudden sharp pain if someone hadn’t clapped a hand over her mouth and wrapped the other arm around her waist and dragged her backwards. She bites at the hand, ineffectually, and twists and struggles and tries to kick but he hoists her off her feet, surprisingly easily, and a voice hisses in her ear, “Stop that – it’s Howard Stark.”

She’s so surprised she falls limp immediately.

“Dammit,” he mutters. Jeffries and the other man have apparently completed their transaction, moving apart now. The stranger _climbs the bloody wall_ as Jeffries moves briskly back towards the party, tucking something into his tux pocket.

“Now look what you’ve made me miss,” Howard says ruefully when they’re gone. She drags away from him, whips round angrily –

“Gonna go see if I can catch him up,” he says, sliding back from her.

“I want an _explanation_ ,” says Maria, “ _come back here_ –“

It doesn’t stop him. Before she quite knows what she’s doing she’s climbing the wall after him and running down the street in her stocking feet. Her dress is torn and she’s still dizzy from the whiskey and her dropped cigarette has probably lit something on fire by now and she’s laughing like a lunatic as she catches up to Howard and they barrel around the corner in time to see tail lights disappearing around the other, far corner of the empty street.

“Fuck,” says Howard.

“Who was he?”

“That’s what I was hoping to find out by catching up to him.” He’s barely even winded. Maria thinks that’s unfair.

“Shall I call someone – the police?”

He pulls a face.

“You’re _working_ with the police.”

“Not exactly the police,” he says. “I think Jeff is selling secrets to the Russians. Or the Cubans. Or _someone_. He arranges for meets during parties like these at other people’s houses. He’s said some stuff that makes me think he wants me in on it.”

Maria gapes at him. “ _Russian spies_?” she repeats, disbelieving, and then she bursts out laughing and claps her hands together. “Oh, that’s – that’s perfect. That’s the best thing I’ve heard in years. You’d better tell me all about it.”

Howard purses his lips. There’s that clever spark dancing in his eyes again, interested, amused, captivated. “I guess I better had, Miss Collins. Carbonell. Sorry.”

“Well,” says Maria, “what else is a girl supposed to do with a first-class honours degree in reading books?”

“Chase after Russian spies in her stocking feet,” says Howard promptly. “Come on, my car’s right over there. I need a drink after this.”

*********

It’s only once Howard has bundled her into his car that Maria realises the soles of her feet are torn and bruised and bleeding. She grimaces and touches them with her fingertips; Howard glances over but doesn’t say anything. The drive to his house isn’t long; it’s a lovely little mansion, surrounded by trees. Even in the dark she can see the garden could use some serious work.

“The only part of the house I really bother with is the workshop,” he says, slightly apologetic. She grips his arm and limps up the steps to the front door.

“I’ve heard it said you’re a workaholic.”

“Not my only vice, I assure you. I’d hate for you to think I’m boring.”

She laughs. He guides her into the study; she strips her ruined stockings off when he leaves to hunt up a surprisingly professional-looking first aid kit. Pours them both a drink while she doctors her feet and doesn’t bother to pretend he’s not looking at her legs.

Maria likes the way Howard looks at her legs: openly, more appreciative than leering.

“So, Russian spies,” she prompts.

He takes a drink and grins at her.

 


End file.
